Live data from Hacker News

Etsy stock has lost 76% of its value in 9 months

google.com

171–180 of 276 posts

Re: Etsy stock has lost 76% of its value in 9 months

#171
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well you should buy some shares because Wall Street currently think Core Yahoo is worthless.

That's incorrect. Wall Street thinks the Alibaba stake, Yahoo Japan stake and its cash holdings are worth less than their face value - as is always the case (see: how EMC's VMWare stake has always been discounted historically). For numerous reasons, the most obvious of which is: investors can never realize the entire face value of those holdings, so they never give a $1 to $1 value to them. We can simplify this reall…

Tons always have. Look up the valuation of Macy's real estate; it is about 2x the market cap. Even adjusting for the full EV value its at a discount. They would realize more value by shutting down the retail business and selling off the real estate. But investors feel the chances of that happening are slim to none which leads to the low valuation. Yahoo is a tech company but revenue, growth rates, net income and free cash flow are common to all companies.

Re: Etsy stock has lost 76% of its value in 9 months

#172
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well you should buy some shares because Wall Street currently think Core Yahoo is worthless.

That's incorrect. Wall Street thinks the Alibaba stake, Yahoo Japan stake and its cash holdings are worth less than their face value - as is always the case (see: how EMC's VMWare stake has always been discounted historically). For numerous reasons, the most obvious of which is: investors can never realize the entire face value of those holdings, so they never give a $1 to $1 value to them. We can simplify this reall…

[deleted]

Re: Etsy stock has lost 76% of its value in 9 months

#173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The barriers to entry for any competitors are highly behavioral. Consumers are used to using (and implicitly trusting) AirBnB and Uber. Any new entrants would have to replicate that. This is part of the reason why Jet.com will never beat Amazon.

Jet.com won't beat Amazon because they are selling a subset of Amazon's products for higher prices with a worse interface.

You just pointed out another barrier to entry for Uber and AirBnB. New entrants will probably have less selection and higher cost. This is fatal in a fundamentally commodity business. There will be no competitor to AirBnB or Uber for the foreseeable future.

Re: Etsy stock has lost 76% of its value in 9 months

#174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not believable because it is comparing oranges to apples. It is comparing the revenue of the SF taxi industry (not the dollars going through the drivers hands) to the dollars going through Uber for some area of unknown size around SF. It is also unbelievable if you try to do the bottom up revenue numbers. Uber claims to have 11,000 drivers in SF [1], but most of them are part time. This implies a monthly revenu…

Unfortunately the first link doesn't appear to direct correctly. I'm still willing to think 500M is plausible, with Uber Black and SUV included (is it safe to say these professional drivers make more than 3000/mo on Uber?). Even if it's not quite 500M, or maybe they needed to flub the geography or numbers to get to that number, they're still generating huge sums of revenue in what is only one large metropolitan city…

I have fixed the link. They do appear to be generating a large revenue out of the SF area (my best guess is their real revenue is somewhere between $40 and $50 million), but SF is a very unusual market that is particular suited to a service like Uber. How much it can be used to extrapolate into other markets is an unknown question.

The more fundamental problem is how much profit can they generate. Historically, the taxi industry is not one that has generated large profits without political protection (i.e. medallion limitations). It is very hard to see how Uber will be able to achieve monopoly level profits going forward. As I said in the beginning I think Uber is a great business that will make a lot of money, but it just isn’t worth investing in at its current valuation.

Re: Etsy stock has lost 76% of its value in 9 months

#175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AirBNB (and Uber) don't own or control any of the property that they are collecting transactions and fees on. They rely on extraction of value from independent contractors; if a viable alternative exists, those contractors can dump them in seconds (or however long it takes to download the alternative app/website).

The barriers to entry for any competitors are highly behavioral. Consumers are used to using (and implicitly trusting) AirBnB and Uber. Any new entrants would have to replicate that. This is part of the reason why Jet.com will never beat Amazon.

I remember when Yahoo was a manual index, AltaVista was the best internet search, and Hotmail wasn't a MicroSoft owned company... when most email addresses were truly painful (anyone remember doing internet email via fidonet? compuserve?).

Google has now been king for a while, but if someone came out that did things clearly better, people aren't tethered.. even Facebook has its' upstart competition (that they keep buying off).

People are less tied to their services than you think.. yeah, plenty of people are still using yahoo mail, and others aol for email even... but few are dialing in and fewer still could remember their icq login if they tried.

Re: Etsy stock has lost 76% of its value in 9 months

#176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jet.com won't beat Amazon because they are selling a subset of Amazon's products for higher prices with a worse interface.

You just pointed out another barrier to entry for Uber and AirBnB. New entrants will probably have less selection and higher cost. This is fatal in a fundamentally commodity business. There will be no competitor to AirBnB or Uber for the foreseeable future.

Lyft seems to be doing okay, and don't underestimate targeted markets for upstart competition... If you can get most of the BnBs in say Sedona, Prescott and Payson Arizona to use your upstart service, you can grow from there, one targeted market at a time... local presence can be a significant advantage.

Re: Etsy stock has lost 76% of its value in 9 months

#177
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think this has much to do with it. Amazon's attempt was really half-assed (classic Amazon, to be honest). The only mention of Handmade on the Amazon homepage is in the "Search by Category" dropdown. The real issue in my opinion is that Etsy discovered that they couldn't keep growing without opening their doors to cheap non-handmade shit. Which they've done. And their search/discoverability is absolutely awful…

I think the ones who really ate their lunch were companies like Shopify.

Speaking with some knowledge of the company, it boggles the mind a little that they failed to snap up Shopify (or more likely one of that company's scrappier competitors) when Etsy got like $27M in 2008. Every single time Etsy didn't help a seller set up their own e-commerce site, someone else did, and this happened hundreds of thousands of times. And is still happening.

But Etsy struggled with leadership and technical problems in those days that were really serious, and not easily solved.

Re: Etsy stock has lost 76% of its value in 9 months

#178
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Soon we will see uber, airbnb and dropbox added to this list. The problem is the new VC-funded startup model is a sham to rip off the public. Basically build a bunch of hype around fad-based, unprofitable companies with unsustainable business models and capture massive valuation of ~50x sales before going IPO and then insiders dump all the overvalued shares on the naive dumb money and only stick around long enough to…

Disagree entirely. Twitter? No good way to monetize. Groupon? Failed to monetize effectively after virality faded and without a moat competitors did the same thing. Yelp? A web version of the BBB protection scheme whose profit comes from the shake down protection racket against small businesses, not from users. Zynga had no moat and other companies quickly did the same thing with much leaner overhead, like King and a…

Just saying, Box's main target is enterprise market and they definitely charge a hefty amount from their customers.

They have beat analyst expectations for both revenue growth and profit (well, less loss) for every quarter since IPO, it's just a tough market.

Re: Etsy stock has lost 76% of its value in 9 months

#179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I realized that I'm not sure what Yahoo actually does these days. So I looked at their website, and...I still have no idea. Their homepage is set up like a sketchy news aggregator. Wikipedia says they do a list of things (mail, video sharing, online mapping...) that Google and others obviously completely dominate. As a side effect, I'm recalling the days when Yahoo was a directory of websites, and getting nostalgic f…

I still have an email account with them that I setup a long time ago. Use it to sign for various one-offs. It's amazing how bad their email has become. Constant timeouts. Have to switch the "basic" mode to actually get email to load sometimes. The mobile version is barely alpha quality - the drafts workflow is horrible, it sometimes sends the same email multiple times. Issues with refresh. Shows stale emails. "Your l…

There has been a lot of down sizing and loss of mind-share at Yahoo over even the past 5 years...

Re: Etsy stock has lost 76% of its value in 9 months

#180
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook: $38.23 to $94.97 (May '12 - present) [0] Wayfair: $32.18 to $37.81 (Oct '14 - present)[1] TripAdvisor: $27.91 to $70.63 (Dec '11 - Present)[2] Hubspot: $29.05 to $50.04 (Oct '14 - Present) [3] Tesla: $10.40 to $204.99 (Jul '10 - Present ) [4] ZenDesk: $15.25 to $23.10 (May '14 - Present) [5] LinkedIn: $90.09 to $196.10 (May '11 - Present) [6] 0: https://www.google.com/finance?q=facebook&ei=OGyZVsiyEYqNmAG..…

TSLA is a different beast, I think should be excluded. The rest are fair.

I just test drove a TSLA car today. I "summoned" the car from its parking spot. I then drove around town (in insane mode). Turned on autopilot and the car drove down the highway by itself (changing lanes when directed). Went back and then car perpendicular parked itself.

So, ya, it's basically a software company.

Post reply on HN